[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "Srscreroa."]
Sin,—The remarks as to Exhibitions for Poor Scholars in first- grade schools, and the suggestions as to the way in which the ex- aminations may be adapted to the attainments of such scholars, made by my fellow-townsman, Mr. Cardwell, in his letter in last week's Spectator, are both interesting and valuable ; and in the case of such a school as that of which Mr. Cardwell is head master, where "poor scholars" have no hereditary claim, the foundation of scholarships for boys from elementary schools, who are chosen by competitive examination in subjects which are taught in such schools, is an act of spontaneous generosity which deserves to be imitated as well as admired.
I wish, however, to remind your readers that such a case as this is not parallel to that of schools whose whole endowments were specially meant for the benefit of poor scholars ; and the question which I wish to bring before your readers is, whether it is quite fair to convert such schools as these into places for middle- class education, reserving only a small portion of their endow- ments to form exhibitions for a few picked boys of more than usual ability. Yet such is the plan which not a few really liberal friends of education have advocated, as I believe, from not having considered the subject in all its bearings, and from not perceiving what a far more important object might be secured by a stricter carrying-out of the purpose for which such endowments were originally founded (in the spirit, if not in the letter), than by adopting a modern theory about them. Such endowments were not, as I think, intended to stimulate the energies of a few superlatively clever boys, but rather to raise the standard of education generally, by encouraging and helping forward numbers of meritorious youths of the humbler clags, whose parents care enough about their education to make an effort to keep them longer at school than is usual with the children of the poor.
I think, indeed, that such endowments should be made avail-
able for secondary rather than primary education. I have some- times seen Blue-coat schools, and other foundations of the same kind, simply doing the work of elementary schools, and that in places where there was every conceivable variety of schools of the same grade, so that they merely added to that want of symmetry in educational arrangements which is the great defect of our system. When Lord Hartington called attention to the dearth of good secondary schools in so many of our large towns, he puts his finger, as you truly re- mark, on the weak spot in the present movement for higher education; and in the case of almost all such endowments, I can conceive no way in which they could be more valuably employed than in helping to supply this "missing link" in the chain of English education, by forming in each town in which they are situated the nucleus of a cheap and unpretending secondary school, in which the old principle of preserving a large number of free places for deserving scholars should be religiously pre- served, but perhaps combined with the modern plan of selecting such scholars by competitive examination. I should indeed prefer that no child should be admitted into such a school at all, un- less he could pass an entrance examination, equal in difficulty at the least to Standard IIL of the Education Code.
The plan of simply raising the price of instruction at such institutions has the effect of turning them into elementary schools for the middle-class, and this is not what the country chiefly needs ; what it does need is a national system of secondary instruction for
the youth of various classes. For I by no means intend that the middle-class should be excluded, or that there should be no advancement of the fees ; all I do contend for is, that no less proportion of the endowment than formerly ought to be retained for its original purpose,—the free education of poor scholars.-1
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